Tag Archives: freedom

Today is July 4th — “Independence Day.” All over the internet, people are posting about freedom and liberty. The U.S. is, after all, the country of liberty for all, right? Or at least, that’s what some people like to say. Kai Wright, on the other hand, recently wrote a post for Colorlines called “How To Celebrate the Fourth of July: Read Frederick Douglass.” His post comments on the U.S.’s history of oppression and reminds that there should be more to the Fourth of July than blind patriotism. Continue reading →

What if being gay is a choice? Of course, to even consider debating that, we’d need to decide what it meant to “be gay.” Having “homosexual desires,” acting on them, being out, identifying as gay? What about queers? To a certain extent, depending on the definition “being gay” could be a choice (and being queer even more so). If being gay means being out and not acting in a heteronormative way, then yes, being gay is a choice. However, being alive is a choice (continuing to eat, only crossing streets when cars aren’t coming at you, not outright killing oneself — all choices to stay alive). Continue reading →

For me, queer is more than an orientation or preference. Queerness is political. For me, it is about the marginalized, the oppressed, the forgotten. It is about not assimilating. It is about not pretending that we’re “just like heterosexual people.” Queers aren’t all white, aren’t all middle or upper class, aren’t all cisgendered, aren’t all (temporarily) abled bodied. Queers break binaries. Continue reading →

In many ways, when I first came out as trans, I was very much alone. I was attending a women’s college — and while not everyone there identified as a woman, from the people I knew or knew of, the openly trans / genderqueer / gender-variant population of my college was roughly one-half of one percent of the college’s undergrad population. I was sort of making things up as I went along. Continue reading →